Weight

Another morning, another lead weight in that corner of your core that has never forgotten the darkness. You try to ignore it, try to find feathers in fantasy, draw yourself to a trick of the lights like a moth careening to its fiery death. A little voice in the silence behind your rib cage whispers of salvation, tries to tell you that you already know the way to the surface. Your words lie scattered along the wayside, but a few of them get tossed together by a chance whirlwind in the gutter, form a sentence, remind you. 

For too long you have ignored the words that swirl around like a dust bowl in your gut, have let them gather and stick to your flesh, seal the paths that lead air to your lungs. Spin them instead into rope, hold them outside your self, hold them like a lifeline in a dark sea. 

The little voice in the silence behind your rib case becomes clear. Says, hold them like the surface is on the other end.

Eligibility

The rules and requirements drone on and on down the page, describing who you can and cannot be. You find yourself worried you’re not sick enough to be considered, but the way your defenses crater in answering questions you think maybe you only had yourself fooled. He writes from the homeland to say I wish he didn’t have to take care of this mess, and you have found a new word to describe yourself. 

You’ve spent a whole life trying to ensure that no one extends themselves taking care of this mess. 

No one but yourself. 

When can we call you to schedule a screening, the form asks. You want to answer that you’ll sit by the phone till they do, want to say that if tears could earn a place with them, the oceans of your eyes would be a golden ticket all on their own. 

I go to sleep early. In sleep, there is no illness. In mornings, there’s the potential for a dawn. 

2nd Ave

You spend the evening in church, preached to by the East Village’s own reverend of the Earth, reverend of the old Lower East Side, reverend of reminding you why you came to this city and it has nothing to do with God. She foots the bill, but not until you’ve spent two hours panicking about how you’ll be able to pay your half. The choir reaches crescendo and you wonder if you’re falling into the depths. Sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s illness or just poverty.

Either way, you’re crying on the F train again. 

The reason you’re dying is because you’re not spending your precious moments building stories into the sunset. This is not a secret. The reason you’re wasting away is because you’re spending your life neither here nor there, unwilling to commit to mediocrity, undaring to leap into the wide unknown. This is the trial. 

You wonder 

what the odds are 

you’ll survive January.  

You’d place a bet 

if you had any pennies left 

to place. 

Agency

With each turn of her words, she twists the knife a little deeper in your chest. Your eyes begin to flicker, you know so well the way they dance into corners when cornered, how they were always the softest part of you. She tricked you to take off your armor, lay it to the side and step into her jagged edges with nothing but bare skin against the blades. The apartment is cold, suddenly, you are tired when you shouldn't be. 

Returns are fickle, recovery like a fun house mirror. You never know what version of yourself you'll see. 

Never know which turn will have you
looking
at a monster in your stead.

If you want it

The thing is, 
you're allowed to do whatever you want
with your blank pages. 

It's been weeks (months?) since last the ink slipped past your lips, since the electrical impulses of your emotions pinballed against your rib cage and turned into literary curlicues. It seems cruel to be without one's language for so long, to be without the familiar twists of your own tongue, but doesn't it feel like muscle memory when you open the door, doesn't it feel like sinking into a pile of sweaters that carry the scent of an old lover?

I would have traded this muscle memory for your scent,
but you know that
and sweaters don't travel well
across the years. 

The regular bar simmers on a Monday evening,
as it does.
The bartender knows your order though it's been innumerable turns of the dial since last she handed you a drink. This is the mercy of New York City.
It's never so big that it cannot wrap you around its little finger. 

Never so far that it doesn't have a blank page
for you to come home to.

Sun Dance

At the end of the highway, at the base of the mountain, the road narrows to one lane curving into the canyon, wrapped in tree canopy, watched by violent cliffsides, shooting into the sky. Suddenly, after climbing countless switchbacks, the road explodes into a scenic turn, millenia in the making, ten-thousand foot mountains emerging jagged and carpeted from the depths of the earth, jig-sawing themselves against each other, pausing in the turns to take deep breaths of high-altitude air. 

We pass the peak, roll back down narrow sweeps of asphalt, brushing up against aspen tides connected by one single root, millenia in the making, everything quakes and tingles. It feels like it's the first day of a thousand new days, like you turned a corner and was finally excited to see what you might find there, after years of fearing what might come around the bend. 

August coils itself behind you, tucks in its hands and feet and rests in its accomplishments. You have no notes, nothing but gratitude. In the car on the way down, he says the end of the dream is hitting me in the form of stressing about retirement, and you only know what he means in theory. The dream still remains with you in your pocket, silent, biding its time, reminding itself through you by little nibbles along your side. You wake restless. 

The sun sets behind the mountains, your table laden with drinks and swills of writing, unfinished stories stretching their limbs and asking what comes next. You're not quite sure the answer, but you're beginning to get a sense. 

You're not quite sure the answer,
but you look forward
to finding it out.

It's the Risk That I'm Taking

Your childhood streets fall away behind the train car, glittering lakes of cool swims, late at night after the club closed, early on Sundays when parents weren't quite awake yet, long Julys when school breaks felt endless, you were born in the land of one hundred thousand lakes and they never left you, you are more water than land, more forest floor than mind. You forgot your to do list, forgot to follow your prescribed course while here, and somehow you got everything you came for. You sit on a train like moss, like generations of calm lie in your chest, it's all still there, you were never reduced to your current state, only ever expanded, you contain multitudes.

The small towns of your ancestors fly past outside the window, remind themselves to you, they whisper your name and pronounce it correctly, such is their power, such is their gift. You are a whole life of layer, a whole world full of treasures gathered, trinkets piled in the corners of your spine, you are a body made of spirit, a spirit made of woods and lakes and sunshine and moss, you are a lifetime of leaving and coming back. 

This is the heart you were asked to own.
Who are you to turn away a heart
when it knocks on your door?

Ends

If you’re looking for an apartment in Stockholm, it’s yours, he says, like it doesn’t ignite your illness four decades in the making. Like you haven’t crossed oceans for attractive real estate before and you know exactly how many steps it is from his front door to a downtown dip in summer waters you could linger in through fall. 

Like you weren’t currently itching for a change and your recent hits aren’t pummeling like they used to. Up the dosage. 

You wander through your final hours in Colorado, wondering at how fast July always insists on running, it doesn’t matter where you are. August approaching like a specter, forever both a summer month and a whisper of fall. You think your life isn't turning out the way you'd thought, but from another angle you realize it's exactly what you knew, all along. 

You can beat yourself against this wall all you like,
you still end up with yourself.

Sun Set

Pack the dog in the car, she is confused because she knows how to tell time and this isn't when we get in the car. Gather extraneous errands, all you really want to do is drive into the valley to see the sun set behind these mountains where you shelter, see if Colorado feels different at an angle, see if you haven't tried hard enough to love what appears lovable on pieces of paper. 

You were always bad about loving what pieces of paper said to love. 

I came to the Rocky Mountains to write. Instead it seems I spent the time carving out my insides with a teaspoon, arranging the muscle and sinew and blood in little piles on the deck, moving them around like chess pieces, desperate to knead them into smooth dough, into malleable clay I could sculpt according to another ideal. But these are the chess pieces you were given, this is the only body you are able to play. You father spends his days dying, spends his time bemoaning all that he didn't do, and here you are, 30 years behind and no better. God dammit woman, play your pieces or shut up. 

Somehow, you miss the sunset, catch it in glimpses along a backroad in a Boulder suburb, the dog sleeping peacefully in the backseat. She has no concerns, has accepted the odd outing, knows that as long as you're at the wheel and she is wth you, all is as well as it could be. You realize the sunset wasn't what you came for anyway. You came for absolution, acceptance, came to allow yourself not to fall in love. Your old landlord writes from Red Hook, says if you want to come back in September you can walk right in.

The thing is you already have so much love your heart runs over. 

For anything else to come in now,
it would have to be
fucking
magic.

Indian Peaks

Arrive early, when only a few cars litter the parking lot, a cool mountain air lingering along ankles. You don't know where you are meant to be going, take screenshots of trailheads before cell service disappears into the valleys below. The dog stops in every stream to frolic, you stare at pine trees and wonder why you haven't fallen in love with this iteration of wilderness yet. 

It's not for lack of trying. 

A few miles in, the trail begins to climb. Up, up, toward the treeline, toward the sky, switchbacks across flowering meadows and babbling brooks, patches of snow strewn like afterthoughts, and then, around a particularly treacherous corner, an alpine lake appears at the feet of cragged peaks. Someone once told me if the Appalachians were comforting grandparents, the Rocky Mountains were unruly teenagers, and I can see the resemblance. So much to prove, so much ending up only half right. 

The last mile before we reach the car, the dog is running: she sees the end in sight. (She sleeps the whole way home.) I was won over, for a moment, by the high mountains, but when we reach the outskirts of civilization, the wildfire smoggy valley floor, the perpetual afternoon overcast, it blows off me like dirt on the trail. 

My time in COlorado comes to an end. 

I haven't words yet for what to make of it.

2016

is it not better to be sad and free,
to be overwhelmed with emotion, 
rather than complacent and restrained,
underwhelmed and numb?

I am not, without thse demons,
and I missed them. 

I have no choice but to bring them along. 

On Writing

(The longer you've been away,
the longer you need to come back. 

But when you do, you'll find,
that all the treasures you left,

are here waiting.)

Pastel

The sunsets are long here, drawn out dusks that fade into night, as if saving their splendor for another night when maybe you aren't watching. You walk the dog at twilight, in the precise moment when deer and rabbits turn the color of the air, it's a clever wilderness, the dog loses her mind. Above your 7000 feet climb into the air, the sky turns pastel, pinks and lavenders and mints, you still remember the 80s too well to want them back. None of this pierces you. 

You came to the mountains to be pierced. 

A swelling moon rises, and the dogs of the neighborhood begin their crooked symphony. You feel contained indoors, feel restrained, you want to howl at the moon, too, but you keep the doors closed to keep at least your dog quiet. It's a weird claustrophobia. You miss the cacophony of Alphabet City nights. How well you slept to its melody. 

The dog barks at the glass doors. The night grows dark around you, a full moon hiding behind those forever clouds stretching across the valley. Everywhere you turn, pine trees, reaching for you with their spindly darkness, their heavy winters. You miss New Mexico, miss Montana, miss Red Hook with its Liberty sunsets. You wonder what you've come to Colorado to learn. 

You know you haven't learned it yet.
And so you cannot leave.

Deluge

In case of flash floods
the sign says,
climb to safety.

You wish the instructions were clearer. 

How on earth does one get out
of this ravine.

Creak

Old muscles creak with disuse, like forgetting lyrics to a song you thought sat etched in your heart. You know there was a time you couldn't go a day without this movement, without this tingle at your fingertips, and now you go weeks without thinking of it. The cruelty eats at you, as you attempt slow steps, attempt a trepidatious stumble, despair at your poor attempts at Creation, you grovel at the gods, grumble at the universe, think why have you forsaken me, the ultimate in absolution. I am not responsible for this collapse, this ruin is not my fault, why did you leave me this way.

I look up at the valley below, dark storm clouds spreading across the emerging plains, a cool wind breaking the heat wave through the pines. In a clearing, a broad, unrepenting rainbow stands straight at attention, reaching for the heavens, unwavering, shimmering. Unasked for, except you asked for it. Except you asked for anything and everything, you yelled at a ghost in the sky, pleaded with the Magical Unknown for just a morsel of enouragement. 

The gods can lead their pawns to water. They cannot move their muscles, too.

Petrichor

The heat wave breaks, not in a roll of thunder but in a dusting of droplets. They leave the canyon smelling of petrichor, of warm, humid, earth, of something else. It makes you think of longing, and chasms inside your chest, echoing voids of loneliness, wounds unhealed, just covered over, perpetual scaffolding. 

The dog lies underneath the piano stool as you play. You want it to be a compliment but know she’s simply waiting for bedtime. You think you’d best not get a dog of your own just yet, your schedule would morph into a canine clock, your habits suddenly leashed. She barks at ghosts in the dark woods outside the window. You’ve resigned yourself to yours and wonder if you’d be better off barking. 

There’s poetry in there somewhere still, in the dark woods, in the chasm. There’s poetry in the petrichor and you’ve stopped transcribing it, it litters the ditches like banned single use plastics. 

Because what good is poetry without a voice? 

It clutters the arteries,

strangles the lives below. 

Absence

Two months is a long time when counted in minutes and days, but much longer still when counted in moments. How many moments have I not gathered into my pockets since last we spoke, how many spring evenings and airplane tickets, long morning drives through West Virginia woods and Red Hook farewells with fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty outside a kitchen window; that the stories lie unspoken seems like a cruel twist of a vise around your already crumbling heart. 

I am sorry. 

The truth is I tried to stay away, tried to determine if there were other creeks where my stories could bob and weave, like leaves or boats made of bark. The truth is, I tried to stay away, thinking I had lost a magic that I seem unwilling to accept living without. 

The truth is, I don't know why I go away sometimes, and I never expected you to stay. 

A young dog lies at my feet, a Colorado valley lies at my feet, summer is sweltering in my every step across the American heartland, but the mountains were always cooler, the West was always quieter, I revel in silences not heard in months. It occurs to me I am still out here in search of the Pearl. 

I wonder if the search is what life is. 

The Pearl a mirage at the edge of the horizon.

Twilight

By the time I reach the pier, the winds of sunset have picked up, waves thrashing against the concrete and cascading over lovers, gathered to see the sky on fire. New York beams into the beginning of summer, bares its pale shoulders, asks to have this dance. Your adopted neighborhood attempts to woo you, not realizing how easily swayed your feet, how light your heart. Yes, you say, yes. That is enough. 

The nights are long and lonely. 

But they get shorter
when the midst of summer
draws near.

The Rains

Another cruise ship appears while you sleep, it waits outside your kitchen window when you wake, a quiet nod, a gentle greeting, Manhattan lying grey and shivering beyond. You try to take the wink, try to will story out of your unbreathing creative mind, but the wind blowing through your window is so cold, you think your heart will never thaw again. 

You win some,
you lose some. 

But at some point don't the two need to even out?

Broadway-Lafayette

It’s all too much, you hear yourself whisper in the mirror, unwilling to say the words with your back straight, with your voice loud. Eons of regret build beneath your skin like boils, they bubble to the surface like bee stings, you long for the road and your car and you know, you know, that it’s only your broken insides masquerading as freedom, this mental illness has been glorified for too long, you’re ready for your reward now. 

New York rumbles underneath your feet. 

You cannot feel a thing. 

May

Just before sun set, I left the office and got on a bike at Hoyt Street. Turn right on Sackett, cross Smith and the little incline up Boerum Hill, before it's all downhill all the way home. Riding west, the deep, low apricot beam of a sun hangs right beneath the treelined archway. There's a cool breeze in the air, there's the end of a work day on the breeze, my limbs ache with movement, with life, it is May now, and all the things that are to come lie here before us. 

Are you ready for the things to come?

They are here for the taking. 

So take them.

Troponin

Your father has been having chest pains, she says across the line, her normally stoic voice tinged with just a quiver of concern. It's a conversation no one wants to be having, but the acknowledgment that it might be time to go to the country clinic passes over it like a relief. By evening, they've sent him to the big hospital in the other valley, he sends pictures of snowy mountain views but every message is an exercise in carrying hope. You find yourself distracted at every turn, a gnawing sense of unease in the periphery. Your mother eyes her ticket to New York and you both tread quietly around what you already know. 

Life waxes and wanes across your to do list. This is how it is meant to be. You, yourself, wax and wane across the plans you had for yourself, after all. 

We are but leaves in the wind.

Wash Away

There’s a turn in the path, just before you reach the esplanade, full of concrete and crooked branches, a moment of silent nothing, belying the magic that lies beyond. A few more steps, a deep breath, a turn, and the world explodes in a sea of pink blossoms, of birdsong and light steps across green grass. Every year you think you’ve seen it before, and every year you are proven wrong. You’ve never seen anything like this before. 

You’ve never felt alive like this before. 

Spring rails into every cell of your being, bursts like mini grapes, like champagne bubbles in your blood stream. You think maybe this life is worth living, you think maybe this life is worth making the most of, you are ready to decide what that entails and to do it. You are ready to hit the town, hit the road, spring forward straight into space, May lies around the corner and you can feel it in your bones. 

If you were looking for a ride, now might be a good time to speak up. 

If you were looking for a ride, now might be a good time to set fire to your hopes. 

Starlight

In the space within your rib cage where your lungs normally reside, in the space within your schedule where most days you have panic and scramble, for one evening you make room for words, your little stories. Time becomes irrelevant in the little wood-paneled living room, they write to say, stay as long as you would like, and you wonder what you would like. At the coffee shop, neighbors and strangers speak with each other like they're in a tiny village in the woods, not a great beast of a world metropolis. It warms you. Outside, a cool wind blows the cherry blossoms across the street. 

You long for nothing, yet you long for everything. The world lies vast and possible beyond your door, your door, but it lies vast and impossible inside your ribs as well, it is an equation you have never been able to calculate successfully. One seems to take too much from the other. 

Both give more
than you could ever have hoped.

Revel

How the days rush beneath your calloused hands, they wax and wane to no end and you are powerless to stop their passing. And yet, would you stop them if you could? Is it not like damming the river, like trying to hold the spring flood? One cannot step in the same river twice, but all that means is what a delight it is to step in as many rivers as you simply ever can. You spread your fingers and watch the clear water trickle over your fingers. 

An early morning run, Red Hook is empty save for the dog walkers in Valentino Park. You flail along the water, your muscles still sleeping and your head elsewhere. Brooklyn rises in spring blooms, your life rises in colorful petals and deep breaths in your lungs the kind that lift you off the ground.

Life is finite, you have but this one.
You do what you will with it, of course.
But it seems wisest just to live it, after all.

There may come a day, when you won't regret it, and that day is worth all the wait.

Apply

The house sitting website unfolds itself before you, one delectable life after another serving itself up for perusal, for consideration, for you to think, Do I want to play pretend here for a while?, and all the options are limitless. You make a profile, paint yourself in all the desirable colors, you know how to angle your illnesses so they look like just the thing someone else was looking for.

This much mental damage deserves some sort of benefit, you think. 

You're losing too much hair lately, your body is too restless when you wake, it knows May is coming and it will be time to leave again. May was always the time for running, it's in your bones. You sit in a coffee shop and breathe in a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn, wonder what else you could be doing with your lungs.

The road calls you again. 

You're starting to think there is no cure for what ails you.

Dock

You wake to the sound of cars in the rain, to the soft sense of a world muted. In your kitchen window, a cruise ship covers the Manhattan skyline, and you think how great it must be to board a boat on a rainy, gray morning and know that soon you will be where the palm trees are. You make coffee and return to the wood-paneled living room, sit and write in the silence, willing yourself to ignore the deadlines that loom on your own horizon. Outside your window, the trees are popping their sticky green popcorn kernels into existence.

The budding trees are a precursor to May, and May is a reminder of the Road. Your whole life, spring has been the time to run, to burst forth like those sticky buds and explode like a million tiny sparks of glitter across the continent, has been the time to put everything you own away – things and people alike – and be light as a feather. This gift is not lost on you, nor how it may look like a Madness, depending on your angle. 

And what choice do we have, but to unwrap the gifts we've been given,
see what lies in the unknown beyond?

Waterways

The early evening sun hangs low like an august sigh, something in the air smells just like summer breaks of your childhood, you weave through the docks to reach a ferry landing and everything breathes in you like life is ongoing, unbothered. Cross the water in just a few minutes, upended on Manhattan shores like you haven't moved to the ends of the earth, you ride a quick bike through Chinatown, the route so familiar you'd forgotten to miss it. Find her in a small nook of a bar in the east village, heady with unscented perfume and thick drapes, think, this would be a perfect date bar if dates were something you entertained anymore, and the bartender walks you through their elaborate cocktails like he's never been hurried. 

By the end of the night, trying to make my way back in the maze of Brooklyn subway suspensions, eventually I walk back under the BQE, smoking a cigarette that followed me from Africa. On a stoop, I find a bright red bicycle helmet, and I'm not too drunk to see a sign when it appears. I bring it home. 

There are moments when I wonder why I continue this exhausting living, when I wonder why everyone carries on for decades and decades like they do, why we do not simply return to the ground from which we came. But then there'll be a soft summer evening on a ferry in the East River, a golden sun spreading across the Brooklyn bricks, and you'll take a deep breath and feel perfectly at peace, and that moment

That moment keeps you carrying on another
day.

CHS

By the time checkout arrives, the great rains have piled in over the coastline. You can imagine 18th century hurricanes drowning colonizing entrepreneurs, making their money off the backs of shackled humans and thriving off their own daring leaps into the world. The histories of the one doesn't exist without the other, and it is a legacy the sweltering peninsula has yet to reckon with. 

The drive to the airport is a dive in the ocean, you know the delay will catch you well before it appears on your screen. The stereo system plays Here comes the rain again and you wonder if it's on purpose or simply cruel irony. And while all you want is to return home, to sit quietly in the crooked apartment at the very edge of Brooklyn and watch the sun set over Manhattan, pacing an airport brings you just as much peace. It may take a lifetime to build a home, but once you get there, it remains with you. 

The desert calls you again, the road. Your suitcase is full of new itineraries, your head is full of dreams. This town broke you once, 

but you have yet to be broken.

Ghost Tour

In Charleston, slavery lies thick like an August afternoon across the streets. You know this town, you have seen it before. When you think of it now, all you remember is how it was the beginning to the end of a great love. You know this is not the city's fault, but your heart has not forgiven. He leads you through cemeteries and speaks of boo hags, but the only thing that catches you are mosquitos and the great exhaustion. You wrap yourself in a robe and fall asleep like you didn't have an alarm set for before dawn. 

Ghost is a relative term,
it's no more - and no less -
than what your mind makes it.

North Island

The days batter the hours from out of your gut, you walk barefoot in the low tide and collect oyster shells like you had somewhere to put them. By the time you return to the docks your neck is flushed. In the early morning, while breath still swells in puffy clouds, you run to the beach and dive in the waves before it is too late to turn around.

The sea has saved you time, and time again. Why would this be any different? 

You go to the ends of the earth,
but truths will follow you both there and back.

-By-The-Sea

You wake at dusk, watch pinks and lavenders stretch themselves across the horizon, see the sun rise in the break of the wave. Drift across the coastline like pelicans on the breeze, taking it all in, letting it all sink to the bottom of your chest, it sits there peacefully. 

At the arboretum, you arrive just in time to watch a goat be born, the timing seems impossible and you wonder at wonder, at winks from the Universe. The new hotel overlooks the ocean, too, the afternoon sun turns the dunes into long fingers, stretching into the sea, the palmettos a particular shape of gold. You wish you had more time, always more time, you want to see the whole world and only wonder how you can do that and still have a dining room with your grandmother's china. 

The world does not reveal itself to you. 

The answers lie hidden like grains in the sand.

Re:Set (II)

The storm passes, and the pool opens. The resort livens up again, despite the chill of the wind, despite the deadlines on your brow, your remote work setup on the 18th floor balcony leaves much to be desired – work ethic, most of all. How can there be work when there are palm trees? How can there be reality when there is suspension. You think you could live an entire life like this, and it occurs to you that you do. 

You know there was a time you struggled even to put air in your lungs. But it seems so long ago now, it seems so impossible in contrast to how the air twirls through you now, how the sun seems to rise in your eyes. 

I know there was a time life seemed a cruel joke. 

But that time is not now.

Hook & Barrel

Taxi to the runway closest to the water, so you feel like you might just tip into the Long Island Sound, ascend into a storm so big it doesn't fit on the radar, it shakes you all the way to South Carolina. You emerge like Dorothy, shaking off the dust and stepping blinking into the ocean. What are you doing here? What did you come to find? The hotel room is larger than your apartment, the sea is wilder than your thoughts at night, you think perhaps if you let yourself go to the whims of the Universe, eventually it will give you wings. 

You stay awake much longer than you mean to. 

The Universe might swing by in the night,
and you'll want to be here when it does.

Only Fools

March ends with a content sigh, leaning into cherry blossoms and gentle breezes, dragging light weekday rains across the old East River docks. You drive the illness from your lungs with determination, honeyed teas, and more rest than you've seen in ages. It is stubborn, but you have survived worse ills, you remind it, you have survived a Darkness and once you can dig yourself out of Death, you are invincible. 

Another airline ticket stretches in your back pocket, nothing ever feels better than having one foot on the tarmac, you collect yourself and remember that all this frenzy leads you to an arrival, and that makes all the difference.

April begins with a whisper,
but you do not chide it.
You have begun entire dreams with a whisper

Have moved mountains
with the lightest nudge.

Gossamer

Your dreams are waft, wavy, lightly pulling hopeful longings across the skin on your forearms. You are reminded of your ambitions, of the light you see on every horizon. The illness wakes you before dawn, draws the lungs from out of your body, hits your over the head with demands for rest. You drink honey tea by the buckets, count down minutes until you may lay your head on your pillow again. 

We do not reach the sprouting of spring,
without first enduring the death rattle of winter.

Arrested Development

Illness rages through my body like wildfire, dividing and conquering my cells like foliage on a forest floor. Everything aches. 

(Sometimes,
when one has a mind that tends to do
the raging, 

This is a welcome relief)

Some Ends

When I wake up in the early morning, my voice has abandoned ship. I try to speak but all that comes out is wind, is imperceptible apologies. He writes to say he wishes you the best, and you cannot yet gauge how the farewell sits in your senses, though you are tempted to feel free more than anything else. A season spreads out ahead of you, the road spreads out ahead of you, you feel your body change to fit your own narrative.

The illness takes you back to bed, hinders your fireworks into the sunny afternoon. You are not angry. There is no room for anger in your chest, it is full of forward motion, now, this illness sweats the last of winters stagnation out of you, drives the pretend play from under your nails. 

The shoots are sprouting from the ground,
now.
It is time for you
to unfurl as well.

Omakase

The B61 waits when you run up the F train stairs: returning to your nook in the neighborhood at the edge of the map is easy some nights, and that’s how it gets you. The sommelier waxes on about romantic relationships and if we really need them, as he pours you more free champagne, and it seems you have built the best life for yourself without the rom com endings you were force fed in your youth. 

It seems you have built a life around the city of New York, around the people who saw you through the worst of it and brought you out the other side, around the idea that if you could go to this city, live madly, and write, you would want for nothing. 

It occurs to you that you want for nothing. 

Fortune favors those who keep their eyes open to see it. 

Tumble

The days catch up with you, as they are bound to. There's a cold in your lungs, a twitch in your eye, a doubt in your veins. You trudge through work, thumb through your plane tickets, self-soothe with ideas of new futures, bright unseen highways across the country discovering a vista where you did not know it would appear. 

For better or for worse looks different when you never really had the better. The road looks sweeter when you thought you might resign yourself to get on without its freedom. 

The nights are longer, when your hours are only your own. 

I mean that
as a good thing. 

May is coming.

B61

You learn the rhythm of the inter borough transit system. Don’t take buses in the afternoon, don’t turn them down at midnight. Don’t expect the express trains to run smooth, don’t forget there’s a river between you and the island and you do not decide when you can cross it. Appreciate the time of being in-between. She says she will not come visit you in Brooklyn, but you think that’s a process she’ll need to work through on her own. 

You begin to think about visiting California. 

He tells you to stay in his midtown apartment even while he’s away, make the transit easier, but he doesn’t understand that you are not suffering, that you are not enduring the railroad apartment with the mid century living room lounge, that find joy in the strange isolation of a neighborhood at the center of the universe. He doesn’t understand that you fought so hard to be here that even your demons gave up eventually, and they were built by the definition of perseverance. 

Doesn’t understand that you love New York the way spouses love each other 50 years into for better or for worse. I do not cherry pick my conveniences with you, New York, when I say I love you I mean I love 

You. 

Bottled

(it's here, it's come,
there's a moment every year where you aren't quite sure you'll
make it
and then it arrives on your
doorstep, like
a breath of air after
drowning, a
warm embrace after
years in the desert, you
forgive every desperate day, every
hopeless heartbeat, you
are washed clean by the sunshine,
by the way twilight
lingers
past your bedtime,
by the way you wake in the morning
already smiling, 

You know there was a time 
you were sure you wanted to die

but it just doesn't matter
now.)

Returns

They move the clocks forward like it isn't magic, like it is not a gift to give sunlight to darkness, give spring to the thawing ground. You know it at once, like a silent alarm inside your bones has begun to vibrate, like an armor has been welded to your rib cage and you are invincible. You made it, somehow you made it, to the other end of winter, with nothing but blooms and brightness ahead. It was less cruel than it has been, you are less frail than you once were, a year ago the ice broke from around your shoulders and you felt again what it is to be alive, the moment has etched itself into your memory and you revel in it now, let it melt on your tongue like a butterscotch, smooth, sweet, joyous.

You wrap your work early, bring your computer to the little writing desk in the closet, look out over the afternoon light over the Red Hook projects and churches. Wonder if you'll make friends with these streets in earnest. The trees are barren, still, brown with survival, but knobby with impending sprouts. Everything that is to come, is on its way.

Take a step, just one step, then take another. It doesn't seem like much now, but eventually you will have walked all the way into life.

the Rains

Would you like to stay longer than May? they write into the ether, just as you are musing about how you have fallen in love with the creak of the wood floors, the light in the windows. You turn a corner to find the boxed up remains of your life on sixth street, letting them spill into the corridor and picking among the jewels for little wafts of magic to bring upstairs. Spring feels just out of reach still, and though you know it will appear, you write them that you do not know yet what May will do to your bloodstream. 

Back in the apartment, you revel at a moment's peace, at a moment when no one is trying to reach their hands through your walls. You wonder what it means that you don't want their hands right now, but it is too soon yet to say, too soon yet to worry. Daylight Savings ends tomorrow, you know how it sparks in you like promises, know how it twists your ear drums until you hear music on the breeze. What could I possibly tell them about May before feeling that?

I go to sleep in a stranger's bed,
but the sovers are all mine. 

It's too soon yet to know what that means.

Blåmärkshårt

I'm holding on too tight, I know I am, creating knots where I wished there was need, creating obligation where I dreamed of joy. I was always either/or, could never sit still on the balance beam. I think it both scared and drew you in, I think I feared going out in search of that peace in case it lost your interest completely.

I dig my heels into the little nook of Brooklyn, but my hands are reaching for the Big Sky. 

I wrap my arms around your body at night, 

but my legs are already

running.

Red Hook

You wake at last in the neighborhood you've courted so long. The nooks and rooms of the apartment stretch in different directions, like a labyrinth, ready to discovered. You feel right. Out of the kitchen window, between tree branches, you see the Statue of Liberty rise to the morning, and it feels just like that summer in Greenpoint, when you sat looking at the city and thinking only of how this was quite where you were meant to be. In a few months, the view will be shrouded in foliage, it is a cycle of gifts. 

I sit at the little writing desk in the window, looking down on Brooklyn backyards, rising projects, the dots of water towers. A heat riser churns behind me, the ground lies bare yet, but all I see is spring in the sunrise. There are words here, I can feel them, can sense the return of stories in my blood, and as such, 

I am already home.

Fog

Wake early again, stretching into jet lag like a familiar friend, one more morning of midtown skyscrapers in your periphery and you have never been mad a day in your life at the bones of this city, no matter how the finished face looks. Your own finished face looks paler than you remember, a few days ago in their tropical back yard, than you remember, a week ago on the savanna. It seems impossible for it to be just a week, you refuse to do the math. One day we left our mothers' embrace for the last time and didn't know. 

Spring sits just at the cusp, dangling its legs over the side of a skyscraper, waiting for the time to leap. You watch with bated breath, watch with heart beating out of your chest, there's a brief moment in every ounce of joy ladled with fear, there is in each moment of life and ounce of death, we are not without our contrasts, I did not know love until I knew
the emptiness of being
without.

Van Brunt

If you want it, the place is yours, they say, hand outstretched full of keys, windows wide open to the sweltering heat of iron radiators, pronouns amended with the life journey. You can see your storage unit from the bedroom, can sense the Statue of Liberty from the kitchen, can smell spring in the way the sunlight streams through the rooms. You take the keys before you've even remembered to ask any of the relevant questions, this was always how you made decisions in love, was always how you committed to homes. New York always met you where you needed it to. 

Later, in the coffee shop down the street, you feel the city return to your blood stream, feel the life return behind your temples, you know again the stirring in your gut that alwas moved you forward after winter. There was a brief time when the stirring remained absent, when you sat stagnant in the death and mulch, but what use is there to think of it now, what purpose is there in lingering in past selves when the current one is actually alive?

the Queen of New York City

By the time the train rolls into Penn Station, I am reluctant to step off, like riding the A train is something I could do for days. (And maybe it is.) The New York afternoon is mild, a kind welcome as I drag my heavy bags west across the avenues, even as my sunburn fades before I've even reached the 28th floor. She writes, come by and see the place any time before noon, you measure the days and compare them to your current leaps, realize it would be the longest you'd have stayed in one place since you left the little shoebox on sixth street. I'm better for having been here. 

Spring appears in me in time with the crocuses and snowdrops, makes me want to stretch my legs and set off in step with the whirlwinds of the season. I find myself wondering how the little station wagon out west is doing, wondering how far my saved airline miles would carry me, before I've even unpacked my bag. 

Perhaps it was naive to think
we could ever change into different people.

Promises

Charles de Gaulle before dawn, the shops aren't open but the smell of coffee (real coffee, you hear yourself think) sails across the terminal. You feel your sunburn start to cool, you feel your heart still beam, in a few hours you will be in a north Chelsea skyscraper and while you cannot yet imagine what your heart will say against its skyline views, you know you've never landed at JFK in remorse. This is a gift, it is not lost on you. Words begin to return, she says see you at our regular bar when you land? I'll get a table with room for your bags, New York whispers to you of stories yet unwritten, somehow you walked off one day in search of the world and found answers you hadn't known to ask for. 

 You find yourself wondering what would happen if you stepped off in Paris.

It's Not a Habit, It's Fine

Final days always disappear in a whirl, in a flash, two weeks of a trip feels like two months but it's a ruse because time is a construct, you see your philosophies simmer like the hazy tropical days you are leaving behind. You know nothing lasts forever, but it's so hard to accept in the parting. He stands in the window outside the terminal with farewell waves and your heart aches despite itself. Separations always tore your heart in two (why then did you insist on making so many of them on your own?). 

Later, at the gate, you try to wade through work long abandoned but your heart isn't in it. Your heart is elsewhere, maybe everywhere, your heart is a million miles wide
your heart
grows and flows beyond what you thought it remembered how to do. 

Years you spent buried in the quagmire, forgetting how it might be to feel this way. But they do not matter now. 

What hides underneath the ground
is of no concern
when you spend your days
flying.

Gate

Lazy Saturday morning, wake before the rest and tip-toe down the stairs to find coffee, only to be stopped at the last stair at the iron gate, keys hidden, alarm on. What strange worlds unfold around us. Africa sits like a song in my ears, like rolling waves of madness and peace. I return home changed, but it is too soon yet to say how. I will wait for the gate to open. 

I will see what is on the other side.

Maasai Mara

The bridge has been washed away, he says, so we’ll have to take the long road. The long road turns out to look a lot like it’s been washed away, too, but eventually the truly all terrain vehicle reaches the camp by the river. Our hosts arrive wrapped in their cloths, bright spots in an otherwise camouflaged Savannah. 

Later, standing in the open roof of the car, watching the elephants walk by unperturbed by your awe, you think there was a time when I did not believe it would be worth to live to see this. The feeling is so distant now that your outstretched fingertips cannot reach it. At night, your hosts lead you through the bush, careful that you do not run into the hippopotamuses that live along the river banks at your feet. The sky is a million stars. You think, my heart is full. Fall asleep to the sounds of the world. Fall asleep like your life is worth seeing. 

Part

He begins to pack his things, prepare his departures. We wander around the tropical garden, remarking on our sunburned bodies and full spirits, and you are awash with gratitude that your trip is far from over, already plotting your returns. Africa nestles its eons of birdsong under your skin, any lingering winter on your brow alights with the morning coffee on the veranda. He says to pack your safari bag light, we leave at dawn. Back in New York, other voices say other things and you forget how to hear echoes across the oceans. Surely it'll return to you, surely you can be more than this one trick pony of escapes into the wilderness at first sign of stillness. 

(You want to believe it, but you haven't seen the proof,
yet)

When You’re High You Never

Returns down the mountain are quicker than the ascent, you run hand in hand and her eight-year-old body squeals with delight. Come morning everyone sleeps a dreamless sleep under twisted mosquito nets. You watch hippos leap in the water and spend the whole drive home with African stinging nettle burning along your thigh. 

You still haven’t the words, haven’t the capacity for what it all means. She writes you from Manhattan and asks when you’re coming home, but what she’s really asking is when will you land 

and

the thing about it is, 

You’re not sure you truly will. 

Naivasha

Arrive at the top of the mountain in an exhausted daze. Look at the volcano rim in silent awe, unsure what could possibly be said to match its quiet majesty. Later, by the large lake, with cicadas conversing and lights blinking across the water, the silence says more than words, anyways, so you stay quiet. 

You tell her you only see differences now, only obstacles. She says isn’t that what people do when they try to self destruct. 

The moon is full  

I take a long drag of a cigarette, look at the haunts of ny past review before me. I remember who I am. 

It’s just, on the road of your life across the oceans, the blinking lights beam wherever you hope they take you to go. 

Big Five

Lessons in Kenya: 

When a lion lies to rest against the side of your car, you stay put.
When a rhinoceros picks a fight with another mountain of an rhinoceros at an arm's length from your eyelashes, you gun it out of there.
If a giraffe appears out of the canopy ahead, you can remind yourself this is real life and not Jurassic Park.
Backyard concerts underneath starlit nights in a neighborhood you couldn't find again to save your life can sit forever at the base of your shoulder blades instead.
Friendships built over decades and continents do not need to sit anywhere, because they are everywhere.
Sometimes love feels like lemon juice on a perpetual paper cut,
and still can be your most precious possession. 

You can spend years building a stable home, a predictable periphery, convincing yourself the tranquility and safety will let you sleep soundly at night. But one day on the other side of the world, one day of wonder, of madness, of sweet fragrant tropical nights and madness in the eyes of familiar strangers, can crack open the shells you've laquered around yourself, can let your covered spirit flow out like lava into the open air, burning the reliable ground beneath you
but also
setting the sky aflame
with magic.

Asante

Morning arrives in the highlands long before dawn, a tempest of birdsong in the trees outside your window. You sleep too little, so many nights of bright starts and REM deficits, but you step barefoot onto the back porch with a cup of coffee in your hand, and cannot remember how to be angry about it. 

While the house sleeps, you have every intention to take the chance to work, but work evades you when words fall into its place. The air is sweet with exotic flowers and mosquito repellent, a light breeze lifts the unassuming clouds in and out of your line of vision. The water in the pool is warm, the grass against your bare feet soft. One day your parents carried you for the last time, the life is not lost on you. You pick mango fruits right off the bough and think perhaps there is more to life than you're currently giving it credit. 

February withers in the margins, molts from your pale winter skin. Embers of joy travel along the inside of your skin and send shivers down your spine. There was a time when you did not remember how to want to live, it's not that long ago, but in your chest it feels like the words of a whole other person. A sun rises over Africa. You begin to look for tickets to keep in your backpocket, again.

To a Friend

You fall into a deep sleep, the kind that only the remains of a red eye, translatlantic flight can offer. When you wake up, the Red Sea lies below. A man is praying in the galley, his prayer mat travel size, the silence around him heartening. You splurge on an hour of Wi-Fi to download work, only to find that the work refuses to be downloaded. This may be a sign. 

The anticipation of arrival evades you, like you cannot imagine what lies on the other side of that Arrivals door, and your lack of imagination surprises you, was this not your strong suit? You only imagine you've packed too many sweaters.

A new horizon beckons. 

You walk towards it as though you always knew you would.

Terminal (one)

Can you hang the key on the hook by the door before you go? he writes from somewhere over the Atlantic. You walk around the apartment and collect your things, close another chapter in the book you can't stop writing. The Brooklyn sun is bright, like it's trying to remind you that it knows the secrets of springs, that it will bring them to you if only you wait a little longer. The piles of snow melt quietly on the street corners, as you drag your suitcase to the L train, reveling in the transit that always grounded you to yourself, always brought you home. At the airport, you try to distract the agent from checking the weight of your bag, try to distract her from checking the weight of your expectations, your cheeks flush with spring sun, how can you possibly explain to her the freedom that sits in your ever-expanding chest. An exit row seat appears, your heavy suitcase disappears, you have all the time in the world now to sit and stare out the panoramic window as a city which has promised to wait until you return to it, a city that has promised to bring you spring if only you promise to come home. 

You are all promises, all confidence in the idea that somehow you can still have it all. 

That somehow, the pearl will be handed to you. Somewhere along the line there will be girls, visions, everything. 

It isn't hard to promise,
then.

Upend

You look behind the nightstand, in search of the end of a charging cable and finding, instead, a cockroach the size of a small bird, dead on the floor. Your time in Bushwick draws to an end, a great nor'easter drags across the borough but disappears in a sigh, the streets cold, the pavement wet. A ticket lies in your inbox, spring lies around the corner, there is much left to do, but you begin to believe, at last, that perhaps you can still do it. So many questions remains, but then, so do you. 

And as such, 
all is still possible
ahead.

Just Bear with Me

He wakes early, makes coffee while you stretch in a warm bed, a February morning rising over the lake outside your window, a dream of many voices on the tip of your tongue, something about leaps, something about departures and returns, you mull it over like a curious riddle, no longer like a fire to evade. On the train home, I stare at the gray February skies over the Hudson river, watch the northern tip of Manhattan cozy itself into view, like a morning hug from a lover you didn't know you'd missed in your sleep. 

The time is coming to pack your bags again, it's all you do is pack your bags these days, it feels like nothing more than exfoliating your skin in the shower, like nothing more than coming out brand new, time and again, like winter has nothing on you because one day you put everything you owned into storage and shed your skin until only the very heart of you remained, and the softer your heart, the stronger it is, you've learned this from all the times you thought it was broken beyond repair, you've learned this before. 

It breaks
and breaks
but is not broken.

There's a reason we whisper our lover's name into the night.

Go Ahead

The to-do list turns hoarse from yelling at you about the things you are ignoring, you spend your days staring into the sunlight and thinking of spring as a metaphor. Come sunset, he picks you up on 14th street and you careen into the mountains, the winding paths more familiar to you by the day, the sounds of the forest when you leave the window open at night. How are we meant to work when there is life to be lived? You cannot make the math come together. 

And you're not sure you want to,
anyway.

Re:Set

All day, a tangle of anxieties, a knot of the galloping to-do list firmly ensconced in my gut. I get nothing done, on a week when I needed to get so much done. Inertia drags through me like a rake, like a trawler, like lead. My face in the mirror like death exited a cave after a winter slumber, forgot her airs, was painted sallow by winter, I longed to bury the day in the garbage and start over tomorrow. 

But the running shoes beckoned, the mild temperatures, the strange industrial back streets of Bushwick that promise you a moment to yourself. So you defied the late hour, the dark night, the howling to-do list, the shrinking hours and their demands, and you went out into the night. 

I come home with pink cheeks, with smiling lungs, come home with a mind on fire and poetry in my veins. Come home unconcerned with my deficiencies. I sit down instead to write, to drink bourbon and feel my soul float elsewhere, this is a gift. 

This trick has saved your life before. 
There is no reason why it wouldn't
again.

Beside the victory

When you rise to another day of sunshine, your lungs begin to believe it. The weight around your temples announce themselves only throught their absence. You bring your running shoes to Chelsea, bring your hope to the 28th floor of a skyscraper, still spent too many hours wide awake in the middle of the night, questioning everything, but come morning you sleep a deep sleep, wrapped in if not answers, then at least sentences that in periods. 

Come daylight, you sit alone in the glassed-in space, unable to stop yourself from singing into the Hudson River views. There is work to be done, surely there is work to be done, but you survived January, and that requires its own joyful mayhem and you have no intention of ignoring it. The riverfront promenade calls to you like reminders of a time before the Great Fall and you thought you'd never be rid of that plague on your heart but you do feel different now, you do feel almost like the person you were in the before times, just a little more tired, a little more worse for the wear. 

You survived January.
Maybe now, soon,
You may live.

Rise

After weeks of overcast gloom, the sun beams over Manhattan. Blue skies, blue Hudson River waters, blue reflections in Midtown skyscraper, bright lights lifting your eyelids from the depths of sleep, sweet reminders of where you've laid your head, the smell on the borrowed shirt like a hand to hold when you didn't ask for it. 

It shows up your self-reliant superego by offering things 
you didn't think
you even wanted,

depositing them on your
doorstep quietly
so you don't need to go through
the motions
of protesting. 

On the street below, yellow cabs make their way to the West Side Highway, Sunday revelers greet the sun along the High Line. She writes to say they've canceled their plans, they're ordering bagels and staying in bed. You find a bike, make your way through a city that's held your hand through everything, go to see people who've become family in sickness for a moment of health. Spring is far away yet,
but you feel hope begin to sprout
in your spine
all the same.

Supposed to Know

By the time it's time to wrap the evening, Brooklyn lies oceans away, the landlocked path of Chelsea like a beacon in its stead. You find a bike on Barrow Street, weave it through the tenth avenue yellow cabs, past the diner where you used to walk the dog, past the Marquee, past the doorman who doesn't  know you but doesn't have the guts to admit. The key that isn't yours unlocks doors that aren't either, but you feel at home anywhere you lay your words, you no longer tiptoe in hallowed spaces, and you're not sure yet what that means. 

In the late afternoon, they call you with news the kind that breaks your chest and turns your tears into confetti. You realize you've been holding your breath for nearly two weeks and when it releases from your lungs, you have nothing left to hold you up, nothing left to keep you from turning into a soft petal on the floor. You have never been happier about the collapse. 

The Chelsea apartment sits quiet in the late night, his absence like a soft reassurance you look for in the empty rooms, you no longer break in fear of the silence. There was a time you'd have given anything to have a key in your hand. 

It's hard to accept safety,
when you've learned to rely on the
opposite.

Are you feeling nervous,
are you having fun?

Don't be scared
Don't be shy,
come on in

The water's fine. 

Unsleep

All afternoon, you are tired. In the early evening, you sit in the deep bathtub and wonder if it's too early for bed. You long for it like a long-lost lover. 

But come midnight, your eyes are wide open, your mind a pin clear state of perception. Thoughts and questions align themselves, wait their turn, shuffle through your awareness like it's their day of reckoning. He gives you a key, tells you to come by anytime, to stay here, to make yourself comfortable and anyway it's closer to the hospital than your Bushwick sublet. When you tell him you are not yet ready for an apartment the kind you'd put your furniture in, his voice is sad in how he asks you why.

You realize the parts of you that do not fit the mold used to make you sad, too, used to make you think something was broken within you. Now you caress their soft edges, hold your oddities to the light and whisper how much you love them, that they not shy away from building strength in their prisms of color. 

Sometimes what we think is broken
is simply who we are. 

You take his key,
but you sleep at your own place,
tonight.

Groundhog

We make jokes that it’s more of the same, that we’re stuck in this time loop, but it’s too soon for such a joke, I am not ready to laugh yet at setbacks. I take meetings from a visitor waiting lounge and the clients fawn over the skyline behind me, the strange gift of skyscraper views isn’t lost on me. 

Later, over pad see ew, you tell him how you are not yet ready to land in a place that will have you take your things out of storage, and the sadness in his voice when he says Why? makes you think people are not ready for your fires, for your flights. You no longer see sadness in the way your roots refuse to depend on mailboxes, on furniture that nails you to the floor. 

You see only how they wrap themselves around other souls like tubes in a hospital bed, like upper east side hotel sleepovers, like circles of support that extend around you for miles across this island. 

You used to think your lack of a mailbox made you unmoored, a specter cursed to walk the earth without somewhere to land, but it isn’t true. You sleep secure in the embrace of people who’ll walk to the ends of that earth, just to bring you home. 

86 and Lex

Will you come stay with me, she crackles over the line, a weeks worth of hospital chair sleeps finally breaking across her temples. I got a room at a hotel up the street. 

You make your way back to the upper east side, this strange anomaly of a neighborhood you forget is on your map of New York City, stop in at the hospital and walk laps around the corridors with him, gossiping about the nurses and digesting possible futures. By the time you reach the hotel room, she sleeps. You tip toe your way to the bed by the window, shimmy into crisp, white sheets and think, so much of what we encounter in life we could’ve never guessed would happen. 

New York lies comfortingly outside the window, lulls you to sleep, lulls you to peace the kind you’ve only ever felt here. The west calls to you, the world calls to you, but only New York can bring you home with a whisper. 

If You Are the Ghost of New York City

When in doubt,
song will untie the knots
in your chest
will remind your lungs

How to breathe.

An entire day whiles away from under your feet. You do not mind. You have run out of New York hustle, have run out of will to keep your calendar full. You sit in the bath tub until the water goes cold instead, stare at a wall and try to feel the blood return to your body. On the screen, a man moves to New Mexico. You think, I lived there once. Now you cannot see the future anymore, and you don't know where you'll live in it. 

There should be poetry to come out of this darkness, should be stories to billow out of the pain in your fingertips, but all you want is silence. 

All you want is someone else to do
the breathing
for you.

When I Cannot Sing My Heart

You make your way to the East Village at noon, when it slows down to its mid-day lull, when it looks like the home you could always return to. You navigate crosswalks without thinking, because it's rhythm sits in your veins despite the long absence. Their apartment like a second home, the children unaffected by your comings and goings because they've never known a day when you didn't belong to their lives. There is a magic to friends as family, you have long known it but never failed to be bowled over to see it in action. These are the support systems that will carry us all to the other end of this nightmare.

Later in the afternoon, you make your way over to the writing bar, tickled to find yourself in its neighborhood on a Monday, how New York gives you little pats of encouragement when it knows you need it. Sink into its colored lights, its soft music, its reminders of what you ever came into this life to do. When we forget the point of it all, that reminder can set us straight and get us to take a step again. 

In this storm, I have lost my words, lost my way, I disintegrate like dust in the hospital corners but at the end of every hurricane, there is a dawn of stillness, there is a blank page where you can turn your turmoil to tales, where your bleeding heart can turn into a hand full of ink. In the darkest cloud, you still remain certain the sunlight of the Word will return to you again.

After all, in all this life, it has never let you down before.

Recovery Room

The nurse leans against a column near the elevators, looks at her and says, do you know what I read in his records? It just says, 'coming out of anesthesia, still has his sense of humor.' No one does that. We laugh, gratefully accepting any breath of levity in a day that has been anything but. The hours while away at their own pace, shaded hospital windows confusing your perception like Las Vegas casinos, the point is to be here without question. 

At last, when the Upper East Side begins to go to bed, we are able to carry her out of the gates, drag her to food. She says I cannot possibly eat and we say of course but order her meals anyway. She cleans the plate. We make jokes of newfound friendships in sterile corridors, because at the end of the day everything else is too heavy to bear. You turn around and upend your own tears onto those around you, and they step up in ways you could only ask for with your most hopeful of hearts. 

When you come back to Bushwick, late Saturday night and the kids all out, your suitcase still in tow and your eyes empty with exhaustion, it's like you're breathing for the first time all day. The apartment is cool, you thank him silently for fixing the radiators, think, people step up in ways you could only ask for with your most hopeful of hearts, think, support ripples across the water until it reaches peace.

Think,

I would never have known to ask for
half of the gifts I've been given.

Amen

Hospital time takes over your calendar, breathes minutes into hours and miles into millimeters, when you say you’re coming to sit in that hospital room whether she asks it or not she cries on the line and walks five blocks west instead of east, lost in more ways than one and upended at the Carlyle before realizing her mistake. When she says I just love him so much, what she means is I don’t want to live without him. You begin to crumble and see your own safety nets arrange themselves around you, that you may be able to pay it forward and wrap your own whole safety net around that small corner hospital room. When you say you’re coming back early she cries again and says please come straight here and sit with me. Says if we both die will you take our savings and the kids? When you talk on the phone you laugh, because what else is there to do, but when you hang up, you fall into a pile on the floor, overcome by your trembling body, surprised at your unusual frailty. 

But when he wraps you up in the quiet upstate night, for a moment you think, maybe it will be alright. For a moment you think, you have pulled yourself together before. Now is not the time to fall into piles, there will be time for that yet. Now is the time to do the things unasked, to appear in the spaces where otherwise grows worry, now is the time to hold your breath until a balloon appears in your chest and carries you all the way through to where the calendar can be made right again. 

Hospital time

She comes home late, well after the kids are asleep, whispers into the hallway they’ve spent a lifetime building, says I left him to sleep, I’ll go back in the morning. The kids asked you to tell scary stories for bedtime, blissfully unaware the new scares that sit in your breath. 

You cry the whole way home on the L train. 

She speaks new secrets into the Negronis you keep pouring each other, you both pause between the weighted truths, say, This is hospital time, say, This is cancer time, think, everything is different now but between you it’s really more of the same, there’ll be new tests in the morning but between you it’s really just more of the same and when you cry the whole way home on the L train you feel nothing but gratitude for a city that will let you wring your chest open in public at 12:34 am, feel nothing but faith in hospitals with secret exits to fairy lights and taxi cabs that show up in the rain, feel nothing but hope in relationships that brave the cold of winter to endure another year, another decade together  

When you cry the whole way home on the L train you feel  nothing

but light.

Ticket

Your hand lingers on the button for just a moment, you look over the travel details again, confirm connections, calculate pennies in your bank account, calculate joy in your heart. Push the button. 

A whole new trip reveals itself into your life, speaks of as yet unseen wonders, of long awaited thrills, you think it had been a minute since you had a ticket in your back pocket but that isn't true at all, it's been a year of tickets in your back pocket, been a year of making up for lost time, and you are not ignorant to the treasure chest that cracked open inside of you as the Darkness walked out. 

The vastness of the world becomes trite when you try to put it into words, becomes small in containment, cannot possibly paint its entire spectrum onto a blank sheet of paper. But you cannot not try. You cannot go through a life without turning it into words, because you do not know how to know it unless it is shaped into serifs, do not know how to bring the world without you unless you can bind it and carry it under your arm. 

January waxes and wanes in that cloudy space behind your eyes, but for the first time in years, it hasn't taken over the blood in your veins, the breath in your lungs. For the first time in years, you feel as though you can trust you'll make it out alive, feel like spring is just another lightness on the horizon, not a frail lifeline on which your every step hangs. 

Feel like you've found that the answer you were looking for
was in your own hand all along.

Scratcher, take ( )

You try to count the Mondays spent in the far corner of this bar, try to hold the mountains of magic it has amassed in your hand, you come up short every time, your heart cannot hold all the love you feel for this dark space and its warm lighting, this warm space with its inviting energy. I still remember the first time I stepped down these stairs in careful anticipation, still remember the very air of the neighborhood, how suddenly there appeared a little piece of New York that was molded only for my words. It's been years now, but I still feel exactly the same, this is a blessing. A neighbor tumbled in later, we joked with the bartender and told stories in confidence, this, too, a gift. I took the L train home later, strangely making my way out of the neighborhood that for so long was mine. Bushwick was dark, and a little cold, but my keys fit in the door and my things strewn over the kitchen table, this was all I ever asked out of a life. At the end of the street, the Empire State Building gleams in the distance. 

Everything will be alright,
I just know it.

Exit Light

The bathtub fills slowly, but steadily, inches upon inches, crawling up the side. You step in when it's just past your ankles, but the edge of the bathtub reaches past your shoulders, it's the deepest bath you've ever had in New York, the luxury is not lost on. You pull the curtains from their windows, desperate to drag sunlight into the dark Brooklyn nook where your suitcase currently rests. It's been seven months now of your trinkets in storage, of your life on wheels, and you have no desire to step off the moving train just yet. 

You wonder how to explain that to someone who hasn't bought a ticket in decades. 

You wonder how to explain that the West still whispers to you, that your nights are spent dreaming of winding roads and air the kind that expands in your lungs with the altitude, how your nights are spent staring into a starscape that defies belief, how your words yearn themselves to freedom, how they spurn against conformity, the straight and narrow. 

It occurs to me that these words have brought me too far, for me to let them wither now.
Occurs to me that the stars have already spoken,
and whether to follow them or not was never a question that needed answering.

Viral

Another illness roils your lungs, you cannot believe how the after times come for you, but what is January if not a rug pulled out from under you. You light your therapy lamp, sign a lease for a small nook in Bushwick, return to the fifth-floor Nolita walkup where your hat currently hangs, lean into the comfort of having keys to New York City in your back pocket, they do a good job at replacing tickets, sometimes. 

You were dragged around the world for so long, you thought you'd never know how to be still, how to set roots and sleep soundly. 

Instead, it turned out, you can sleep wherever you close your eyes,
can belong wherever you have yourself a key.

Nolita

You take a late train home from Atlantic, nothing running like it should and your breath like a cold cloud escaping from your lips, but when you climb that bridge to Manhattan, does it not expand in your lungs like a tonic? Step out at Grand Street, skip across icy Chinatown crosswalks, see the Empire State building peek through the ends of the avenues like whispered reminders of what you come home to. 

How do you explain the feeling of landing at the edge of the Manhattan skyline, to someone whose heart is ice?

He says he doesn't need to speak to references, says These are the cute keys, says the radiator is set to the Spanish Flu, and you know just what he means. You send him a deposit instantly and take the keys before you go. Sometimes you think the things you know do not fit on this island, do not fit in the realm of his embrace, could not be contained in a myopic love. But you don't yet know how to put that into the words of someone who doesn't listen in poetry. 

So you let it drift around like dust bunnies in whirlpool breezes, wait patiently for the sentences to align, make no questions that you have no interest in answering, at the end of this cobblestone street is the Empire State Building, at the end of all your steps is a city that still tingles in your hair after all these years, at the end of this story you still made a home in the one place that made sense, if that isn't poetry, 

you don't know what is.

of Time

Return to the city, again, again, returns upon returns, forever a grateful reunion, through the bowels of Penn Station labyrinths, through snowy avenues and tingling skyscrapers, how many times can you see this city as if for the first time and love it as if you'd never known a life without it? The gift is not lost on you. 

He says stay another night, says stay another lifetime, says Life doesn't have to be as hard as you make it, and you don't know how to trudge through a life if it's not heavy. Look at apartment listings and wonder if it's a mistake. You were never better than when you lived in a suitcase. 

There was a time when you thought that made your cursed. 

You're starting to think it's a gift you wouldn't have known to ask for.

Austin

Arrive in a town with none of your footprints on it, immediately begin to make them. Piece together a puzzle that reminds you of others but also of nothing. Remember how you went to Southern California one autumn to make peace with a city you thought had taken everything from you - and it had.

Only, the things which were yet to be given to you had not appeared on your doorstep. You couldn’t lose them in that fire. So now when they appear in the palms of your hands they feel strange, weighted, precarious. This town looks nothing like that one. 

Only if you’re trying to make it something 

you do not get to keep. 

Swell

They come in on their own, the tendrils of nerves that seemed so deep in slumber that they would not wake. They stretch and weave and make themselves comfortable in the little nooks and crannies of your being, spaces that have rested empty for so long, and once they switch on the light, you cannot stop thinking about them. This is the part that grates at you, that you had forgotten. 

Absence only appears when a light has been turned on to show it. And its image flashes across your retina even after the lights are off again, even after the door is closed. Now the absence is an object which exists. You move mountains to fill the void.

And all you find
is that you like the exercise.

Upstate

When you apologize for all the things you bring with you, he says, it's not that much, really. When you fall ill after dinner, he cleans the kitchen and tucks you in. When you disagree about your views on the future, it's a game of curiosity, not a duel to the death. The snow falls outside the upstate windows and you have no fear, because everything has been made light.

In the early morning, you tip toe downstairs to the kitchen, just as dawn paints the snow in pinks and violets, the streets quiet, the old house creaking peacefully, while he lies sleeping in the attic nook you've known and loved so long. Nothing seems different, but you do. Nothing looks different, but you are. Your ears ring with the silence. 

But your mind speaks volumes, all on its own.

Insurrect

A week passes, you forget your words. An illness returns, a fear wafts past your senses. You lean your head against the dog's, tell her the suitcases don't mean what she thinks they mean - even though in the end, they will - warm tears trickling down your cheeks to the satin of her ears. You think about love and leaving, think about the fires that have driven you to the ends of the earth, think about the grounding roots that have tried to bring you back. Later, on a stepladder in the storage unit that houses everything you own, you look at the future and try to piece it together like a broken crystal vase. Your friends open their doors. Your heart trembles on the threshold. 

Holds a suitcase
and wonder where it goes.

Happy. New. Years.

When the countdown comes on, you feel a strange tingle it's been ages since you knew. Your favorite bar - your sweet refuge in a sea of change - is as usual a mosaic of New Yorkers making their way through the world, and for a moment you are all the same. A flamboyant man in a small tank top gives you all beads, your favorite bartender throws paper party horns at everyone along the bar, the room erupts in joyous mayhem. At 12:01, a group of youngsters leave, and you are tempted to tell them, back in my day. Your phone explodes in wishes for a happy new year, and you think perhaps we have to hold on to these shreds of joy, when the rest of the world is in such shambles. 

You vow to hold on to those shreds best you can. 

In the morning, a new world lies silent in anticipation. Nothing has changed, but it is possible everything has changed. You look back at the year behind you, at how impossibly far you've come since the last January first, what beautiful, soul-affirming, awe unfurled before you, as you returned yourself to the world. This year, may it be just the next step in a staircase you've spent so much effort in building. 

This year, may you tie those shreds into a lasso,
may you use them to go forth and capture
the stars.